Spirituality | LOVE IN BLOOM BLOG

Most of the time we think of love in terms of what love can do for us, imagining that when we “fall in love,” all our dreams will come true.

We want so badly to have our own feelings recognized, our own needs met, our own insecurities handled, and our own desires fulfilled that the notion of love as service is almost inconceivable to us. We can get so caught up (or bogged down) in the notion of love as a what will I get out of the experience that the idea of serving another is extremely distasteful. At a deeper level, we’re afraid that by serving we might lose the sense of our selves we’ve worked so hard to attain. But in its purest state, love is service, a wholehearted offering so satisfying that it doesn’t feel like service at all, but rather self-fulfilment of the highest order.

Most of us still need practice for this particular outreach of love. We’re not sure how to serve or what our true service might be, and we haven’t practiced serving to such a degree that it feels second nature, graceful, or effortless to us. The truth is that we’re all already serving in one form or another. If you’re a parent, you’re serving your children. If you’ve cared for an invalid neighbor or an aging parent, you have also served in love. If you’ve bandaged the wing of a wounded bird, given a homeless person a dollar, saved a stranger from drowning, given up your set on the bus, then you too have served in love. These are the seedings of service , the places where our hearts have started to open, but should you choose to have your service grow into a huge and sheltering tree, you will be given many opportunities to mature your gift of true service.

Begin by asking yourself the following questions: What does it mean to serve? What would my true service be? How can I develop my service so it can truly become a gift of love? Service in love is temporarily sitting aside your own needs, wants, and priorities and allowing the needs, want and priorities and allowing the needs of another human being to become radiant, so vivid, and so pertinent that, for a moment, your own are dissolved. This gracious moment is love, and the more we live in the practice of service, the more we create this love. For when we serve one another, we also serve the great cause of Love with grace.

A relationship is always far more than we imagine or expect it to be. It is more than a living arrangement, more than being together in a social circumstance, more than the bright-colored kite tail of romance; it is the coming together of two persons whose spirits connect with one another, beautifully and painfully, in the in the inexorable process of their individual becoming.

In this respect, relationships are like relentless grinding stones, polishing and refining us to the highest level of our radiance. It is this radiance that is the highest expression of love and why a relationship is a spiritual enterprise.

When we look at the person we love with the expectation that he or she will or should solve all our emotional problems or make all our worldly dreams come true, we reduce that person to be a pawn in our own self-serving plot, seeing the relationship as an experience of “What can I get?” or “What can I become?”

When we view a relationship from a different vantage point, one that acknowledges it as a spiritual incubator we start to see the person we love differently. We see him or her as separate from our hope, from our demands that he or she be a particular way now, for us. Rather, we recognize our partner as a spiritual accomplice that we hold in the spiritual light.

Holding your partner in the spiritual light is seeing the other as a soul in a constant state of becoming, encountering your partner in all the radiance of his or her own being and strivings to be. To hold the other in the spiritual light is to seek the pure spirit that lies behind the limitations of individual psychology and social circumstance, to apprehend the full essence of your partner, as he/she was since time began, as they will be for all time after.

To do this is to reach beyond the petty and even gigantic disappointments that you experience during your time together, to apprehend the divinity of this single unique and exquisite being who has been given to join you on the journey of your own becoming. To hold each other in the spiritual light is to see one another’s souls perfectly engaged in the process of love.